Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday July 06, 2014 @09:45AM
from the that-old-familiar-story dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with the latest news about NSA spying from documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or "minimized," more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans' privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents."

Look. On the one hand, it will be virtually impossible to make the technology disappear that allows any government unprecedented surveillance powers.

Based on the historical evidence of the governments of men, it would also be rather reasonable to expect there will exist elements within our governments willing to exploit national security fears to abuse surveillance powers.

With awareness, ignorance is left off the table as a selection. At least if we are made aware, we then choose to make a difference or play along.

Look. On the one hand, it will be virtually impossible to make the technology disappear that allows any government unprecedented surveillance powers.

Based on the historical evidence of the governments of men, it would also be rather reasonable to expect there will exist elements within our governments willing to exploit national security fears to abuse surveillance powers.

With awareness, ignorance is left off the table as a selection. At least if we are made aware, we then choose to make a difference or play along.

Actually, with widespread incorporation of encryption, NSA will not ever have the resources to try and decrypt what they now fetch in the clear. And lets hope that it is incorporated soon, to keep Google and other search engines out of your life.

Actually, with widespread incorporation of encryption, NSA will not ever have the resources to try and decrypt what they now fetch in the clear. And lets hope that it is incorporated soon, to keep Google and other search engines out of your life.

You are posting cognitively on Slashdot.

Most people are not like you. Read it again... it does not say don't like you.

Widespread incorporation of encryption will statistically miss at the average consumer, the weakest link.

The point is not to make a dent in the collective ignorance of Americans. That's asking a lot. What is the point is to uncover the man behind the green curtain, who promises us he is keeping us safe with his awesome powers, but is instead bumbling around, lying, and providing a fertile ground for abuse by collecting too much information and having an opaque process. Evil loves the darkness, even when the "good guys" are the ones that turn the light out in the name of national security.

You really think that this kind of shit doesn't go on in other countries? The biggest difference between them and the NSA is that they either a) openly admit to spying on their own citizens(China) or b) Are much better at covering their ass.

So wait. You're saying China's most secure spy bureau does not subcontract their sysadmin duties to Dell, to be filled by an unvetted and frankly suspicious temporary worker? Not Iran, nor Syria either?

Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about âoerawâ intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.

Every step of the way, the NSA has been forced to go back and qualify its previous statements.And not just statements to the American people, but to Congress as well.

One analyst rests her claim that a target is foreign on the fact that his e-mails are written in a foreign language, a quality shared by tens of millions of Americans. Others are allowed to presume that anyone on the chat âoebuddy listâ of a known foreign national is also foreign.

In many other cases, analysts seek and obtain approval to treat an account as âoeforeignâ if someone connects to it from a computer address that seems to be overseas. âoeThe best foreignness explanations have the selector being accessed via a foreign IP address,â an NSA supervisor instructs an allied analyst in Australia.

And these are the carefully vetted selectors that are being used to not-spy on Americans.It might be faster for the NSA to just make a list of the things they haven't publicly lied about.What a farce.

The real farce is that Americans will keep voting for the same two political parties, no matter what they do.

I think that is what annoys me the most. Where is the public outcry? Nobody seems to care that our once famous Democracy has become something twisted and evil. All top level NSA managers should be imprisoned a year for every illegally intercepted message. But that will never happen, no one can do anything to reign in an out of control criminal agency; Congress won't do anything because t

there is plenty of public outcry. You here it everywhere. In every bar, in every street corner, where there are *people*. From conservatives, to liberals, to anarchists, capitalists and socialists alike.

You won't here it on the TV, the radio, but you'll here lots of it in the printed press.

I think that has more to do with how the voting system is set up, and less to do with collective ignorance.Collective ignorance of the US population is yet more propaganda they tell us to accept their abuse of our neighbors.

We don't have a choice at the voting booth, because of systematic elimination, and exclusion of canidates that oppose the system, and systematic corruption of any that might get through.

the USA was never a democracy, and what little bits of democracy that exist in the system only date to

Well, they're using the excuse that they are forced to lie because the programs are top secret, congress isn't authorized to see the data so congress should stop asking questions so they don't have to lie to them.

The intelligence oversight act of 1974 gave small groups in congress the ability to oversee intelligence activities that breach rights -- the basis being that warranting evidence would then lead to permissions of privacy violations, etc. I don't understand why this isn't still important. It was important in August 2001. It was important on September 10th 2001.

The intelligence oversight act of 1974 gave small groups in congress the ability to oversee intelligence activities that breach rights -- the basis being that warranting evidence would then lead to permissions of privacy violations, etc. I don't understand why this isn't still important. It was important in August 2001. It was important on September 10th 2001.

Probably nothing can be done to stop it in the short to medium term. I suspect that many years from now historians will look back and see this as just a phase humanity had to go through, kind of like the evolution from monarchy to democracy.

It's clear that the power to know everything about everyone has gone to the heads of the political class so badly that they'll never give it up. They'll always find a justification and any "reasonable compromise" that is arrived at won't be what we had 40-50 years ago (i

Every step of the way, the NSA has been forced to go back and qualify its previous statements.And not just statements to the American people, but to Congress as well.

This is kind of like the scorpion and the frog.

Perhaps the concern here shouldn't be the NSA as much as the people who make the laws that enable the NSA to be the way they are. The NSA is a large secret agency that has been created by decades of congressional legislation. Due to "security concerns" the NSA operates relatively autonomously, and, by design, even the president and courts have limited oversight. The limitation of this oversight of the Judicial and Executive branches should be challenged but

Due to "security concerns" the NSA operates relatively autonomously, and, by design, even the president and courts have limited oversight.

This isn't true at allThe President has ultimate authority over the actions of the intelligence agencies.The Congress has ultimate control of funding for the intelligence agencies.Further, both houses of Congress have intelligence oversight committees that were formed in the wake of multiple scandals from the 1960s and 1970s.

None of this is new. FISA was written as a direct result of the US Army spying on domestic protests by American citizens.The domestic and overbroad spying by the NSA is exactly the type

This isn't true at allThe President has ultimate authority over the actions of the intelligence agencies..

To the degree that the President knows what is going on. The problem, in a practical sense, the NSA doesn't have to listen to or inform the President of it's actions. Career civil servants acting outside of the wishes of an elected administration is nothing new... look at the FBI under Hoover or the CIA under Bush. There is an inherent advantage the civil servants have here, not in just being able to classify everything in sight, but also longevity and experience.

Due to "security concerns" the NSA operates relatively autonomously, and, by design, even the president and courts have limited oversight.

This isn't true at all
The President has ultimate authority over the actions of the intelligence agencies.
The Congress has ultimate control of funding for the intelligence agencies.
Further, both houses of Congress have intelligence oversight committees that were formed in the wake of multiple scandals from the 1960s and 1970s.

None of this is new. FISA was written as a direct result of the US Army spying on domestic protests by American citizens.
The domestic and overbroad spying by the NSA is exactly the type of thing that FISA was originally intended to halt.

Every time we pass a law to stop some shitty corporate or military behavior, it gets slowly watered down over the years until it's incapable of meeting its original goals.

While all technically true, the problem happens when these agencies straight up lie to Congress or the president about their activities.

James Clapper, the Bay of Pigs, etc etc. If you believe those oversight committees are worth anything, well...

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

You're not under arrest. You're being detained. Russia or the US?

Target. (You're not being targeted, you're just being incidentally collected.)

I'm not entirely sure what you're suggesting about the Post, Bezos, the CIA, and the NSA ("CARRIER LOST..." Now that that's out of our system, let's continue.) in relation to each other and over what turf, but they're saying "not nice" things about the NSA in 24kt gold words.

At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

If someone intercepts your communications, records them to persistent storage, and keeps them indefinitely for later inspection, YOU ARE BEING TARGETED. Your papers and effects are being seized without any judicial oversight, contrary to the 4th amendment of the US constitution. What the hell is wrong with you?

You are a terrible reader. I cannot imagine a PR piece that could be more harmful to the cause.

It sounds like you allowed some preconceived notion to spin the words for you, because I didn't find your references until the second read through. The first was after reading this post so I was looking for spin to confirm it.

The article was not well written in parts, but it includes some quotes that, taken out of context, more than balance out your spin assertion. The very first sentence in the article explicitly

Your assignment is a load of BS. A PR spin piece can say lots of things, but the headline and the top of the fold is where most readers stop. Anything more than a quick skim is unlikely--and you are prime evidence of that. You didn't even get TFH. Even worse, you didn't read the first sentence.

The very first sentence in the article explicitly states that Americans were not legally intercepted.

Now, that word... explicit. I don't think it means what you think it means. Did you mean IMPLICIT?

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

It says that ordinary internet users (Americans and others) outnumber legally targeted foreigners. At no point does tha

For bonus points, try searching that page for the word 'illegal' or 'unlawful'. You will not find it. Words containing 'legal' appear only twice. The use of 'lawful' occurs once, in 'lawfully', where they claim:

Most of the people caught up in those programs are not the targets and would not lawfully qualify as such.

So, they don't lawfully qualify as being targeted. So it's not actually targeting is what they're arguing. (Also, a load of BS.)

I think it's smart. Lots and lots of people don't respond to stories that are technical and abstract. OK so they spy on people using "tor" with "selectors" yawn change channel *zap*.

Human interest stories are different. This story might reach a whole audience who just couldn't find it in themselves to care until now. But ooooh juicy details about someone's romance with a jihadist, interesting, and huh.... wait. They could get that stuff on anyone, couldn't they. They could get that on me.

So this story could prompt the housewives of America to care more than perhaps they have so far.

The guy now faces a gradual slide into obscurity as the initial outrage over his revelations congeals into apathy and and acceptance by the vast majority... in the best case scenario for him personally, he will spend the rest of his life in departure lounge purgatory like this guy [wikipedia.org]. There are plenty of worse possibilities. I wouldn't be surprised if he goes a bit loopy and we begin to get stories of him doing strange things like other well known whistleblowers who ended up in similar circumstances, when that happens we should remember that every human has a breaking point and it doesn't devalue their accomplishments. Was it worth it? Will he be vindicated in future history? Only time will tell, but what's fairly certain is he won't be alive to see it. I'm not implying there will be assassinations or whatever but that the world's slide into a darker period of history is still accelerating and it will be decades, at least, before the pendulum naturally begins to swing the other way.

I think you massively overestimate how bad Russia is, especially compared to the USA.

Snowden is 30 and newly single. Russia is a large country that is notorious for its abundance of highly educated and attractive women. It has quite a few famous and sophisticated software companies, especially in the security realm that Snowden likes. 143 million people manage to live there without going crazy.

Of all the places in the world to have landed, Russia is definitely not the worst. Heck it's probably the best plac

And how many of those targets should be targets to begin with? With how easy it is for the government to label someone a 'terrorist' or an 'extremist', their targets are probably mostly harmless people, anyway.

The tone of this post is insane. It makes it sound like Americans are the only people on this planet with a right to privacy. What about the rest of the world? So the NSA's only crime is that it spied on US citizens? Is it perfectly ok to undermine those same rights for other human beings?

There are at least three separate arguments here. One is whether it's wrong to spy on anyone. The next is whether it's wrong to spy on your own citizens. The third is whether you ever have an excuse to violate the highest law of the land (the constitution, of course) in order to uphold lesser laws.

It's not hypocritical to believe that the answers are no, yes, and no, respectively. It's douchey, but not hypocritical. Hypocritical would be ignoring the fact that every nation with the funding has an espionage program.

There is a fourth question - whether the US government is helping to create police states in other countries.

If you live in a 'unstable' country friendly to the US, then your every communication may be monitored, not by your local dictator, but by the NSA on their behalf. Personally, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but there is absolutely no legal responsibility for it - it's effectively an "outsourced police state".

No, it isn't okay, but that won't stop people from 'justifying' it by saying "Everyone else is doing it, so it's okay!" or "It keeps us safe, so it's okay!" or "It's technically not illegal, so it's okay!"

@engun: "The tone of this post is insane. It makes it sound like Americans are the only people on this planet with a right to privacy. What about the rest of the world? So the NSA's only crime is that it spied on US citizens? Is it perfectly ok to undermine those same rights for other human beings?"

These are the reported cases. Prbably there are more. Remember that the NSA claimed that it did not track people if the balance of probabilities showed them to be US citizens, but this shows that, once again, the NSA was lying.

How many people are really being unlawfully spied upon? I am not saying that even 1 would be acceptable. But do we have any numbers on that? Because it seems that there was 10,000 unlawful account being spied upon. This is a very small "collateral damage" on the size of the population. There are 313,000,000 people in the US. We are talking about 0.003% which seems "somewhat reasonnable"

Maybe the article was talking about only a single program. But how vast this "mass surveillance" really is?

We can make an argument the framers would not have found it reasonable as well. Just look at how our courts function.

We have a formerly strong but at least still strongly worded 4th amendment that at the time it was written would have greatly inhibited spying. "The right to be secure in ones papers and effects" in the late 18th century left the state with following you around in public and asking people what you were up to without much ability to compel them answer.

If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

They use this information from Snowden, the 160,000 intercepted messages, showing that nearly 10 people were targetted "incidentally" for every 1 legitimate target. With that 10 to 1 ratio, and a transparency report released in june showing that there were almost 90,000 legitimate targets, the math comes out to approximately 1 million Americans "incidentally" targetted.

Of course it's a crock to say these people's communications were spied upon "incidentally". They were explicitly targetted for incidental reasons such as being in the same IRC channel, using a foreign IP address, etc.

What I don't get, though, is that the list of "minimized" targets whose identities were scrubbed as being likely Americans includes "a sitting President". Does this mean they spied on President Obama's communications, and then scrubbed his identity from it? Were these legitimate targets sending threatening emails to thanksobama@whitehouse.gov or what? Did they scrub any reference to his name, even when it didn't involve communications originating from him?

If Snowdenâ(TM)s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 âoetransparency report,â the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last yearâ(TM)s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowdenâ(TM)s sample, the officeâ(TM)s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts,

Nazi checkpoints? Yes that sounds illegal - stopping people and checking if their political* ideas fit a certain profile isn't allowed in any democratic state.DUI checkpoints are absolutely allowed and arguably saves a significant number of lives each year.

(* one could argue that National socialists isn't really a political view but that isn't really relevant here.)

States with greater privacy protections written into their constitutions outlaw DUI checkpoints. Those more closely aligned with the Feds' "guilty until proven innocent" mentality, use DUI checkpoints.

By accepting the propriety of a search without any articulable suspicion that you may be engaged in illegal activity, DUI checkpoint states, and the people who support such laws, are steepening the slope we're on as we glide toward police state.

DUI checkpoints are absolutely allowed and arguably saves a significant number of lives each year.

Fucking bullshit. In the 'land of the free,' freedom is preferred over safety. Randomly stopping people to check if they're breaking the law is definitely a constitutional violation, and it goes over the line.

Oh, some judges may have approved it, but that doesn't make it right or constitutional.

If you seize someone's private papers and/or effects, commit them to persistent storage, and keep them around forever just in case you need them... you ARE TARGETING THEM. Anyone with their communications in NSA possession has been a target of NSA surveillance. If they weren't targets, the NSA wouldn't have kept the data.

Note that this is not yet Greenwald's "Fireworks show" - his promised grand finale was delayed from 4th July. From what I've gleaned, there will be a big-bang scoop naming specific names of US citizens - major public and political figures - who were wiretapped by the NSA. USG has claimed there will be some harm done, so the story has been delayed while the journalist team investigate.

The article doesn't really specify how the 90% were spied upon. It could simply be as a consequence of recording a telephone from a known suspect. I imagine that even a terrorists normal activity consists of many mundane things that involve innocent people: they order pizza, they go to bars, they buy things in stores, etc. Of course if someone is under surveillance, all these innocent people also get involved by the simple fact that they become somehow possible accessories in his crime. I would imagine that

We have a government that's collecting so-called "metadata" on nearly everyone in the country even though it is unconstitutional--one that has lied a myriad of times--and you have some reason to doubt this?

If the suspect is already under surveillance, I imagine that the innocent population would tolerate a loss of privacy simply because that person is a threat.

I can't believe I have to keep reminding people of this, but the US is supposed to be 'the land of the free and the home of the brave.' Free and brave people do not sacrifice such freedoms for safety. I'd rather risk death (though it's not so clear that any of this improves safety) than allow the TSA, DUI

If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply “lurked,” reading passively what other people wrote.

There are others, too, but this would imply that if one of the legitimate targets had a slashdot account, or some other message board, anyone posting or reading the same site might be scooped up into the list of "incidental" targets.

Anyone showing signs of being a "likely" American, according to the article, were then "minimized". ie, their names were scrubbed. Of course their criteria for determining likely American status is not very rigor

The monitoring of connections to an MIT graduate’s server on the university campus is part of the intelligence services’ attempt to particularly focus on users of privacy software on the internet. The computer server is owned by US citizen Roger Dingledine, the creator of the Tor anonymity software. The IP address of the server operated by Dingledine is clearly defined in the source code as targeted object.

The former NSA director General Keith Alexander stated that all those communicating with encryption will be regarded as terror suspects and will be monitored and stored as a method of prevention, as quoted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in August last year. The top secret source code published here indicates that the NSA is making a concerted effort to combat any and all anonymous spaces that remain on the internet. Merely visiting privacy-related websites is enough for a user's IP address to be logged into an NSA database.

Oh, and a sample of the rules [daserste.ndr.de]. Do you read Linux Journal?

Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear 1,227 times in the following four years.

So the President was not the intended surveillance target but his correspondence was unintentionally caught up in their surveillance net as they target terrorists. And they save the President's correspondence. If I was th

What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?

Since the latter is a violation of my constitutional rights and the former is not, I'm going to say intercepting peoples messages. Any more inane questions or can we move onto the topic of why our federal government has torn up the constitution and is currently using it to wipe their ass?

It depends entirely on how you expose the crime - posting the blackmail material into the public eye while exposing the blackmailer hasn't done the victim any good, nor would publishing a sexual predators photographs or videos help the victim.

You misunderstand the function of law enforcement.It is not, directly, to help the victim. In many cases the victim is, after all, beyond help.

Rather, it is to prevent future victims. First by putting the victimizer out of business - and if that doesnt help the existing victim, in fact even if hurts the victim, it still has to be done, for the sake of the potential future victims. This is why we ask rape victims to testify even though they may find that as traumatic as the original crime. Not to fix the dam

What's worse, intercepting peoples messages or making them public for anyone to read?

If by "making them public" you are referring to the messages the article wrote of, then you are a moron. Its clear the reporter got permission from the author of the message to reprint, and the article did very well to show how intrusive the collection process is.

If by "making them public" you are referring to the NSA storing the intercepted message, and then allowing random defense contractor jerkoffs / lawyers / cops / self appointed authorities to access them in the future, then you might have a point.

Do you know anything? More specifically, do you know anything about the constitution, or freedom? If your idiotic mass surveillance scheme isn't being conducted with constitutional warrants and can't help but sap up a information on innocent people (millions in this case), then it's unconstitutional and evil. What is so hard to understand about that?